On March 8, 2007, Bertrand BRAUNSCHWEIG delivered a report on the Methods & Tools Special Interest Group activities in 2006. The report was given within the CAPE-OPEN 2007 Annual Meeting held in Heidelberg, Germany.

After listing the names of the representatives of various organizations involved in the M&T SIG in 2006, B. BRAUNSCHWEIG stated the key responsabilities of this Special Interest Group:

  • Deliver recommendations, supporting software tools, and check conformance of specifications proposed by other SIGs
  • Extend the application of CAPE-OPEN standard to the .NET framework

Then B. BRAUNSCHWEIG outlined the specific objectives defined for 200 and the corresponding deliverables:

  1. Define best practices / cookbook for developing COM CAPE-OPEN compliant components using .NET
  2. Study on the pros and cons of moving to native .NET interfaces for CAPE-OPEN

Deliverable for objective 1 is a document on “How to do CAPE-OPEN COM with .NET”. Deliverable for objective 2 are recommendations on what to do next and how. Both were delivered.

An additional deliverable is the training course on March 7, 2007 with Bill BARRETT (U.S. EPA) and Lars von WEDEL (AixCAPE e.V.) as instructors.The course covered the following points:

  • Introduce .NET. What is it? Advantages?
  • How can .NET communicate with COM?
  • How can we use and implement CAPE-OPEN interfaces with .NET?

Then B. BRAUNSCHWEIG listed the possible applications of .NET with COM and the highlights of CO-LaN’s .NET Roadmap.

In conclusion the objectives for 2007 were given, including the delivery of a prototype Unit Operation in .NET.